The Other Side of Paradise: Toni Morrison’s (Un)Making of Mythic History

Abstract

In his unmaking mythic history by telling the truth, DeLillo has more in common with contemporary colleague Toni Morrison than with Thomas Pynchon, for example, whose two most recent historical novels—Mason and Dixon (1997) and Against the Day (2006)— are quintessential historiographic metafiction. Morrison’s historical novels, not unlike DeLillo’s, all began with historical anecdotes she discovered while editing The Black Book (1974)—an archival collection of African American history. Although, like DeLillo, Morrison is often labeled “postmodern,” she insistently engages empirical history, writing novels that are a rejoinder to a postmodern sense of history. Paradise (1998), Morrison’s seventh novel and her first since becoming the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1993), was greeted with the most mixed reviews of the author’s three-decade career. Reviewers criticized the unconvincing logic of its “war between men and women,” its “rigid and legalistic” male-female dichotomy that results in “a contrived, formulaic book.” A journal review concludes, “Morrison’s new novel falls prey to … one of paradise’s shortcomings as a concept”: “It’s too schematic.… Virtue and vice seem to have been rigorously sorted along the convenient divide of gender; all the women are good, all the men bad.”¹